Climate fiction

Climate fiction (sometimes shortened as cli-fi) is literature that deals with climate change.Glass, Rodge (31 May 2013).
Global Warning: The Rise of 'Cli-fi'
retrieved 3 March 2016 Generally speculative in nature but scientifically-grounded, works may take place in the world as we know it or in the near future. The genre frequently includes science fiction and dystopian or utopian themes, imagining the potential futures based on how humanity responds to the impacts of climate change. Rationales for the genre typically assume knowledge of anthropogenic effects—human-altered climate as opposed to weather and disaster more generally—although broader definitions exist. Technologies such as climate engineering or climate adaptation practices often feature prominently in works exploring their impacts on society.

The term "cli-fi" is generally credited to freelance news reporter and climate activist Dan Bloom in 2007 or 2008. "Climate fiction" has only been attested since the early 2010s, and the term has been retroactively applied to a number of works. Pioneering 20th century authors include J. G. Ballard and Octavia E. Butler, while dystopian fiction from Margaret Atwood is often cited as an immediate precursor to the genre's emergence. Since 2010, prominent cli-fi authors include Kim Stanley Robinson, Richard Powers, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Barbara Kingsolver. The publication of Robinson's ''The Ministry for the Future'' in 2020 helped cement the genre's emergence; the work generated presidential and United Nations mentions and an invitation for Robinson to meet planners at the Pentagon.

University courses on literature and environmental issues may include climate change fiction in their syllabi. This body of literature has been discussed by a variety of publications, including ''The New York Times'', ''The Guardian'', and ''Dissent'' magazine, among other international media outlets. The role of fiction in communicating climate change has been the topic of study.

Terminology

Bloom had used the term to describe his novella ''Polar City Red'', a post-apocalyptic story about climate refugees in Alaska set in 2075, which was not commercially successful. It later came into mainstream media use in April 2013, when ''Christian Science Monitor'' and NPR ran stories about a new literary movement of novels and films that dealt with human-induced climate change. Bloom had been critical of the lack of mention of his role in coining the term in these features. Scott Thill wrote in ''HuffPost'' in 2014 that he had popularised the term in 2009, inspired by the mixture of science and fiction in Franny Armstrong's film '' The Age of Stupid''.

History

Jules Verne's 1889 novel ''The Purchase of the North Pole'' imagines climate change due to tilting of Earth's axis. In his posthumous ''Paris in the Twentieth Century'', written in 1883 and set during the 1960s, the eponymous city experiences a sudden drop in temperature, which lasts for three years.

Laurence Manning's 1933 serialized novel ''The Man Who Awoke'' has been described as an exemplary work of ecological science fiction from the golden age. It tells the story a man who awakes from suspended animation in various future eras and learns about the destruction to the Earth's climate, caused by overuse of fossil fuels, global warming, and deforestation. People of the future refer to 20th century humans as "the wasters". They have abandoned over-industrialization and consumerism to live in small self-sufficient villages based around genetically engineered trees that provide all their necessities. Isaac Asimov credited ''The Man Who Awoke'' for bringing the "energy crisis" to his attention 40 years before it became common knowledge in the 1970s.

Several well-known dystopian works by British author J. G. Ballard deal with climate-related natural disasters. In ''The Wind from Nowhere'' (1961), civilization is devastated by persistent hurricane-force winds, and '' The Drowned World'' (1962) describes a future of melted ice-caps and rising sea-levels caused by solar radiation. In '' The Burning World'' (1964, later retitled ''The Drought'') his climate catastrophe is human-made, a drought due to disruption of the precipitation cycle by industrial pollution.

Frank Herbert's 1965 science fiction novel ''Dune'', set on a fictional desert planet, has been proposed as a pioneer of climate fiction for its themes of ecology and environmentalism.

Octavia E. Butler's '' Parable of the Sower (''1993) imagines a near-future for the United States where climate change, wealth inequality, and corporate greed cause apocalyptic chaos. Here, and in sequel ''Parable of the Talents'' (1998), Butler dissects how instability and political demagoguery exacerbate society's underlying cruelty (especially with regards to racism and sexism) and also explores themes of survival and resilience. Butler wrote the novel "thinking about the future, thinking about the things that we're doing now and the kind of future we're buying for ourselves, if we're not careful."

As scientific knowledge of the effects of fossil fuel consumption and resulting increase in atmospheric concentrations entered the public and political arena as "global warming", human-caused climate change entered works of fiction. Susan M. Gaines's '' Carbon Dreams'' (2000) was an early example of a literary novel that "tells a story about the devastatingly serious issue of human-induced climate change", set in the 1980s and published before the term "cli-fi" was coined. Michael Crichton's '' State of Fear'' (2004), a techno-thriller, was a bestseller upon its release but was criticised by scientists for portraying climate change as "a vast pseudo-scientific hoax" and rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change.

Margaret Atwood explored the subject in her dystopian trilogy '' Oryx and Crake'' (2003), ''The Year of the Flood'' (2009) and '' MaddAddam'' (2013). In ''Oryx and Crake'', Atwood presents a world where "social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event". The novel's protagonist, Jimmy, lives in a "world split between corporate compounds", gated communities that have grown into city-states and pleeblands, which are "unsafe, populous and polluted" urban areas where the working classes live.

In 2016, Indian writer Amitav Ghosh